Abstract:
In New Zealand there is a marked scarcity of material on the workings of the indigenous news media. This thesis is intended to partially fill the large gap in New Zealand scholarship in this area. It provides a case study of the production of meaning by mainstream New Zealand news media organisations. Its purpose is to explicate the dominant messages in circulation from 1981 through 1983 regarding unemployment. The neutral face of the news discourse is shown to conceal the routinized signification practices of journalistic professionalism. These practices act to separate the normative from the deviant. They also serve the interests of society's established and legitimated institutions. This process was aided by the simplistic, as opposed to simplified, nature of news media presentations.
